The courses I am taking:

Philosophie der Kunst: A philosophy of art lecture series in which the lecturer, Prof. Figal is undertaking an impressively learned excusion through the historical greats in order to firm up with his own theory that art is a particular brand of "Erkenntnis" (knowledge or cognition) and thus a launch pad for philsophy itself. We are very much in the middle of things, now transcending Kant and moving to Schiller, but I'm rapt.

Hannah Arendt: A course on the Origins of Totalitarianism. The haphazard seminar structure does little to put the massive book in the lucid context that it deserves. We jump around reading Aristotle and Heidegger to nudge out key terms and I do feel overwhelmed as every explanation seems to reveal itself only with a dissection of the finer points of the ancient greek entomology.

Merleau Ponty Das Auge und der Geist (the eye and mind). I'm just sitting in, but I cant help but do all the reading, as his writing is so deceptively fluid and it gels so wonderfully with the philosophy of art lectures. I'm not utterly convinced by his emphasis on the Body as the key to a phenemological bridging of subject and object, it seems to smack of the kind of one-sided fixation that I found with Levinas's Other. Nonetheless, its a fascinating seminar and an excuse to go see the Cezanne drawings in Basel as soon as I can.

Literatur der Jahrhundertwende (fin de siècle german literature). I was forced to do this course by the german department at sydney and despite a wonderful array of books to read (I loved Hofmannsthal) I resent it awfully.

French: A class full of germans who've learned french 3 years apiece, yet class themselves beginners, and me. Oh, and forestry students who try and get me to do their english homework for them. Bitter agony.


________________________________________________________________________

Also, I went to an anarcho leftist theory reading group yesterday about Herbert Marcuse. Intimidating. At our huge local squat. A room full of men with screen-printed hoodies and berets, getting Adorno wrong (she says smugly). I barely said a word, everytime I formulated my thoughts into comprehensible Deutsch the tack has changed. I possibly learned more about my own cowardice than I did about post-1968 futures.

Naja...